3.4 Prof. Reflection & Commitment | Katie's Learning Journey

Children should know that their thoughts and feelings are valued by adults, and that they can think and speak for themselves without worrying about being wrong or of anyone making fun of them. Education should be for developing self confidence and self worth in order that children feel comfortable with themselves whilst in the school environment.

The aim of school should be to produce well rounded individuals who have a creative and critical way of thinking. I believe that high quality teaching is the most effective way to achieve this. From the 1PP1 placement, I found that as long as children are interested in the lesson, then they are learning, so we should all be making sure that what we teach is interesting to the children we work with.

Education should always be inclusive of all learners. If somebody is making an effort to turn up to school, then they deserve to be included fully in the education system. Saying this, if children are not, or do not want to make the effort to come to school, then we should look to the education system and see what may have disillusioned the learner and look to make changes as opposed to blaming the learner. I believe that school should promote a disciplined approach to education. I do not think it is a massively important point to make, of course teachers should be aware of behaviour management techniques, but they should not be a main focus.

Schooling should offer as many subjects and experiences as possible. The aim of education, in my opinion, is to produce well rounded individuals. I think that the best way to do this is to give them knowledge and experiences. They should study the basics in order to understand the more exciting specific subjects, ie. should be able to read so that they are not focusing on the reading but engage with what they are actually reading. In my opinion, the Curriculum for Excellence does this really well, the idea of one topic spanning several curriculum areas is a really positive one. I think that all children can benefit from such a system.

Teachers were some of the best role models for me throughout school, I always admired them for the way they seemed to know everything. Despite this, I remember one occasion while I was in high school when somebody asked the biology teacher a question and he answered it, but the next lesson he told us that he had given us an incorrect answer and that he had asked another teacher and found out the correct answer. I remember this as, I can imagine, being a teacher it must be difficult to admit to not knowing an answer, and certainly to come back having made an effort to find out the correct answer was admirable to me. This particular teacher, to me, was an example of a teacher who is willing to go the extra mile and therefore was a role model to me.

School should offer the opportunity to achieve academically, but for me there should be more to it than just passing through a system and come out the other end with a certificate of exam results. Of course children should learn some academic skills, they should have developed language and mathematics skills, and plenty experience of RME, Social Subjects, Technologies, Expressive Arts, Health and Wellbeing and Science. They should be able to experience so much more from their time in school: experience success, critical thinking skills, creativity and social skills. They should be directed, but be given enough space to develop in their own way and at their own pace.

After a lot of internet research, all searches for prehistoric maths seem to come back to the Ishango Bone. It was discovered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1960 and is thought to be around 25,000 years old. At a first glance, it’s just a stick with some lines on it and they don’t make any sense.

Initially I thought it was perhaps a primitive tally chart. This would make sense, as the people who used it all those years ago may have needed to count, for example the resources they had or perhaps something like the birth rate. It would also be a very logical way of using numbers and is nothing like our complicated numerical system, as it seems that | =1 and || = 2 and ||| = 3 and so on, compared to our system of numerical not actually depicting the number they represent like this.

Having looked into this more, it is clear that the prehistoric people were far more mathematically advanced than we give them credit for. The Ishango Bone has lines in groups, and the groups are split into 3 rows (a), (b) and (c). (a) shows a group of 9, 19, 21 and 11. (b) shows 19, 17,13 and 11. And (c) shows 7, 5, 10, 8, 4, 6 and 3. Row (a) and (b) both add up to 60, and it is thought that (c) uses multiplication by 2. This suggests that the prehistoric people who used the Ishango Bone must have had a fairly solid understanding of these numbers and been able to use them to aid their everyday life, much like we do.

Further research tells us that more recently the Ishango Bone has been shown to have more markings on it than first thought, and it shows links to the lunar calendar. Claudia Zaslavsky, an Ethnomathematician, wrote in 1991 “Now, who but a woman keeping track of her cycles would need a lunar calendar?”. She suggests that the Ishango Bone was used by a woman or women to keep track of their menstrual cycles. If this is true, then it could mean that the first mathematicians in the world were women, using mathematics to aid them in their everyday lives. This is significant, as even a Google search for ‘famous mathematicians came up with results such as Albert Einstein, Leonardo Pisano Bigollo, Pythagoras, Archimedes and John Napier. This is of course not to take away from all of their mathematical successes, but they are all male.

From a teaching perspective, this is highly informative. I think that it is highly important to take away from this research that when teaching is that generally we see boys going into traditionally male subjects such as mathematics and girls for traditionally female subjects, such as English. However this shows that women can be mathematicians and we, as teachers, should be encouraging this through providing positive role models for them. If the class I was working with was old enough to understand the menstruation part, I would share some of this information with the class to try to encourage girls in the class to do mathematics if it interests them and not be put off thinking that it is for boys. I will also try to remember that the numerical system and how it compared to the one we use and that children will need time to pick it up and therefore not to rush them. From a personal perspective, I am going to try to keep this in mind, but also I think that to remember that the prehistoric people were not as primitive as perhaps I believed before, and I will try to convey this in my teaching if it is ever possible.

Coolman, R (2015) The Ishango Bone: The World’s Oldest Period Tracker?. Available at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/06/the-ishango-bone-the-world-s-oldest-period-tracker.html (Accessed: 7 October 2015)

Mastin, L (2010) Prehistoric Mathematics. Available at: http://www.storyofmathematics.com/prehistoric.html (Accessed: 7 October 2015)

Weisstein, E (2015) Ishango Bone. Available at: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/IshangoBone.html (Accessed: 7 October 2015)

Williams, SW (2008) Mathematicians of the African Diaspora. Available at: http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/Ancient-Africa/ishango.html (Accessed: 7 October 2015)

Zaslavsky, T (no date) Claudia Zaslavsky. Available at: http://www.math.binghamton.edu/zaslav/cz.html (Accessed: 7 October 2015)